Perfect Pairing

Music Express - the primary class teacher's simple answer to 'how do I teach music?' - is now in a brand new edition. All new content in the familiar structure of units, lessons and activities, provides up to date delivery of the English National Curriculum from September 2014.

The new edition offers 60 completely new units of work, supplying musical learning from age 5 to 11. Just as its first edition, Music Express Second Edition presents an invaluable resource of great songs, stories, visuals, movies and music from across the world and across history. With new links to every subject and with lesson plans catering to all music curricula of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Music Express is relevant to all schools and all children.

Fully supported by CDs and audio-embedded whiteboard displays, the books take teachers and children alike on an enriching and thoroughly engaging journey of musical discovery and creativity.

Contents and Reviews

Contents

Unit 1: Ourselves
The children explore ways of using their voices expressively. They develop skills of singing while performing actions, and create an expressive story.
Unit 2: Number
The children develop a sense of steady beat through using movement, body percussion and instruments.
Unit 3: Animals
The children develop an understanding of pitch through using movement, voices and instruments. They identify contrasts of high and low pitches, and create animal chant sounds and sequences.
Unit 4: Weather
The children use voices, movement and instruments to explore different ways that music can be used to describe the weather.
Unit 5: Machines
The children explore beat through movement, body percussion and instruments. They combine steady beat with word rhythms and explore changes in tempo.
Unit 6: Seasons
The children develop further their vocabulary and understanding of pitch movements, exploring pitch through singing, tuned percussion and listening games.
Unit 7: Our School
The children explore sounds found in their school environment. They investigate ways to produce and record sounds, using IT to stimulate musical ideas related to geography.
Unit 8: Pattern
The children develop an understanding of metre – groups of steady beat – through counting, body percussion and reading scores.
Unit 9: Storytime
The children learn how music can be used to tell a story. They identify contrasts of fast and slow, loud and quiet, leading to a performance.
Unit 10: Our Bodies
The children respond with their bodies to steady beat and rhythm in music. They experience combining rhythm patterns with steady beat, using body percussion.
Unit 11: Travel
The children develop their performance skills and learn songs about travel and transport from around the world.
Unit 12: Water
The children use voices, movement and instruments to explore changes of pitch. They develop a performance with different vocal pitch shapes and tuned percussion.